The increasing complexity of electronic circuits places demands on the design engineers to reduce the length of the design cycles and to design circuits in an efficient manner. Vendors seek to reduce the number of revisions and to increase the reliability of the design so as to increase yield and reduce costs. To address those issues, designers and vendors typically use simulation tools to model the behavior of electronic circuitry and using those models to shorten the design cycle.
Although a number of conventional tools exist for aiding designers to address the above problems, they suffer from various shortcomings. For example, designers have conventionally used Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) to simulate electrical circuits. As the complexity of the designs has increased, however, the relatively low speeds with which SPICE and its variants can simulate circuits has become prohibitive. A need therefore exists for simulation tools that can help circuit designers to better meet the challenges facing them in today's markets while maintaining relatively high accuracy (e.g., the accuracy that SPICE delivers).